Description: Tools developed by Martin Wattenberg and his associate Fernanda Vi_gas, have changed the way people look at and use visualizations, by empowering and equipping users with the methodology needed to ask different questions. Wattenberg, whose background is in math and computer science, asks how the humanities have influenced the evolution of data visualization and then answers with several examples from his own work.

Another Wattenberg/Vi_gas collaboration is Many Eyes, a social media tool and Web site that has "democratized" powerful visualization systems by putting them in the hands of general audiences. This tool lets users visualize data in numerous ways, from scatterplots and bar charts to tree maps and stack graphs.

Word Tree, a visualization technique that lets users pick a word or phrase from a data set, shows the different contexts in which it appears via a tree"like branching structure. Chimera takes care of the "boilerplate problem" by examining large collections of text, such as contracts, and pointing out identical phrases. Seeing results arranged in faux 3D "skyscrapers" clearly illustrates levels of recurrence. Although Word Tree and Chimera are fundamentally repetition searches, they are important tools for semantic analysis: simple, but revealing.

The idea behind Phrase Net is to expose a text's underlying network; this visualization tool diagrams the relationships between different words used in a text. It uses a simple form of pattern matching to provide multiple views of the concepts contained a book, speech, or poem.

Another Wattenberg/ Vi_gas collaboration is Fleshmap, "an inquiry into human desire." The relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation are explored in a series of artistic studies employing song lyrics and body imagery. Flickr Flow, Wattenberg explains, is an experiment whose materials are color and time. Software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos of Boston taken during each month of the year and plotted those colors on a wheel creating a "river of meaning."

Wattenberg addresses questions regarding the impact of race in personified visualizations, and his subjective motives in selecting particular data for analysis. He admits that his "hard drive is loaded with failed visualizations," but emphasizes that the visualization process should be one of trial and error. As for encouraging the development of visual literacy, Wattenberg concludes, "as visualization becomes part of the discourse and people realize, 'this is something that's powerful, it can help me make my case in life,' they'll learn I'm hoping for education and good, old"fashioned human brain power."

About the Speaker(s): Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist. From 2005 to 2010, he founded and managed IBM's Visual Communication Lab, exploring new forms of visualization and how they can enable better collaboration. A key project, Many Eyes, is an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis. Prior to joining IBM, Wattenberg was the Director of Research and Development at SmartMoney.com, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Hearst. His work at SmartMoney included the groundbreaking Map of the Market.

Wattenberg is also known for his visualization"based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Wattenberg earned a B.S. at Brown University (1991), M.S. at Stanford (1992) and a Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley (1996).

Description: A focus on designing technologies that allow the "visualization of things not visible" has been at the center of Ben Shneiderman's work over the past two decades. He advocates the discovery of temporal patterns, relationships and clusters via an empowering user experience which enables discovery at a customizable pace and depth.

Shneiderman makes a clear distinction between high"resolution presentation (ala Edward Tufte) and discovery, which he defines as "the dynamics of interaction." Noting that different patterns will be interesting to different people, he suggests that the capacity to quickly test out a viewpoint, to ask a large number of questions in a short amount of timeis an "enriching gift."

Shneiderman cites several different projects which utilize various methodologies of user exploration and empowerment, principles applicable to the scientific and technical world, as well as the humanities and arts. The best known of these is Spotfire, a commercial application of visual data mining and information visualization. (User control _ via dynamic query sliders, for example " directs the rapid updating of a display containing color" and size"coded points.)

He describes other methodologies _ including treemaps (space"constrained visualizations of hierarchical structures), TimeSearcher (a visual analysis tool for time series data), FeatureLens (interactive visualization of text patterns) and Social Action (for social network data, now incorporated into NodeXL) _ as capable of giving "answers to questions you didn't know you had."

Questions from the audience address the challenges of visualizing uncertainty and the notion of a "user" as a participant whose contributions and engagement actually reshape the very conditions of the system. Shneiderman emphasizes a desire to not only empower users but to alert them to potential hazards of interpretation and make them more cautious users, readers and/or participants.

Additionally, Shneiderman encourages an information visualization approach through which selection strategies allow "treasures to rise to the surface" from vast databases. Noting ongoing constraints of time and budget, he emphasizes the processes of categorization and prioritization, and supports courage of ownership for decisions made.

About the Speaker(s): A pioneer of information visualization, human"computer interaction, and user interface design, Ben Shneiderman'swork has focused on database design, human factors in computer systems and information design, and technology"mediated social participation.

Concepts of information design associated with him include dynamic queries and starfield display (research that led to the development of Spotfire, the user"driven analytical tool), HyperTIES, the treemap concept, the Lifelines project, PatternFinder, TimeSearcher, the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer, and universal usability, among many others.

His book, Designing the User Interface: Strategies of Effective Human"Computer Interaction, has appeared in numerous editions and had a profound impact as an educational and professional text.

Founding Director (1983"2000) of the Human"Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCiL) at the University of Maryland, Shneiderman is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received the ACM CHI (Computer Human Interaction) Lifetime Achievement Award. He earned his PHD at SUNY at Stony Brook in 1973.

Professor, Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland
>http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/